Biased Reporters Cloud Scientific Credibility
How many lies does a person have to say to lose credibility? How many times does he have to be wrong before you stop listening?
Science media is on the verge of a credibility breakdown. An individual person is allowed some mistakes before people turn him off. Perhaps he was misinformed. Perhaps he did not have all the information needed to make a statement. He might even be allowed a white lie or two without losing his reputation. If the person is good-natured, acts humbly (e.g., willing to correct mistakes) and has a reputation for personal integrity in general, others will generally give him a leash when he flubs, especially if it seems out of character. At some point, however, too many flubs or incivilities can ruin his credibility. Anything he says further will be taken under advisement. His statements may even be assumed false until proven true.
The same can happen to companies, or to organizations. But can it happen to whole fields of study, like history, law, education or science? It depends on how tied together the leading organizations are who speak for those fields. For instance, many companies are turning to one source—the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC)—for guidance on charities worthy of their support. The SPLC, however, because its leaders are hard leftists, recklessly lumps some organizations into the “Hate Group” category, especially conservative organizations whose charities follow Biblical values. The SPLC, further, gets millions of dollars from radical leftist organizations. It has no credibility as a neutral determiner of “hate” because it has redefined hate in ideological terms. Consequently, any organization that looks to the SPLC for advice on charities will be tainted with the SPLC’s bias.
Worldview Bias
As CEH has shown repeatedly, “Big Science” and its partners in “Big Media” have turned hard left (1 Aug 2020). They were already so completely pro-Darwin, they could not and would not give any Darwin doubters a fair shake. Now, however, they have become a propaganda arm for the Democrat Party, and are even following in line with radical socialists. Everything printed by the secular journals and media outlets has the following filters:
- Present a leftist slant on any and every controversial political subject, including abortion.
- Make Donald Trump look bad and get him out of office.
- Put a Darwinist spin on everything. Pretend that “stuff happens” is a scientific explanation.
- Ignore creationist or intelligent design arguments, or trash them if they cannot be avoided. Never debate them.
- Call anyone who questions the scientific consensus a “denialist” or a pseudoscientist.
If the leaders of Big Science would come out and admit their biases, it would be one thing; but they present themselves as arbiters of truth. They posture themselves as unbiased seekers of facts about nature. Leftist bias is so normal to them, it is like creatures adjusted to swamp water who think it is normal and delicious. What are conservatives to do? They cannot expect fair treatment. They have to treat the water in the Big Science swamp with giardia filters and chlorine to drink it. There are some good H2O molecules in the pool, but the water is so corrupted by these biases, so polluted with Science Fudge, it cannot be taken straight. Unless Big Science and Big Media clean up the science pollution they created, they cannot expect people to give them their trust.
Unreliability, Too
There’s one other problem with the credibility of Big Science. Hardly a week goes by without someone saying, “Everything you know is wrong” on some topic. This week, the British Medical Journal announced, “Doubt cast on wisdom of targeting ‘bad’ cholesterol to curb heart disease risk.” How many years have people been taking pills to reduce their cholesterol? Now they’re telling us that it is unwise to do this! This goes on all the time: eggs are bad to eat, then eggs are good. Vitamins are good, then they are bad. The Food Pyramid is how to eat for good health – whoops, it was misguided from the start. Fat is bad; fat is good. Name any health advice you have heard, and it has probably been overturned. How can lay people believe what the ‘experts’ are telling them? Masks are unnecessary; no, you should wear them. People should avoid public gatherings like churches, but riots are OK.
Science is on the verge of a credibility breakdown, and it’s their own fault. Here are recent examples.
Humans and flies employ very similar mechanisms for brain development and function (King’s College, London). Make like a fly, because that was your daddy. Preach it, Frank Hirth: circuits just happen!
“Our research shows that the brain circuits essential for coordinated behaviour are put in place by similar mechanisms in humans, flies and mice. This indicates that the evolution of their very different brains can be traced back to a common ancestral brain more than a half billion years ago.“
Key brain region was “recycled” as humans developed the ability to read (Massachusetts Institute of Technology News). Why can’t a single evolutionary scientist realize that if the brain evolved from slime, it has no connection with truth? Is the ability to read the result of blind natural selection on innumerable, unobserved random mutations? Behold the stupidity at one of America’s most prestigious universities:
Humans began to develop systems of reading and writing only within the past few thousand years. Our reading abilities set us apart from other animal species, but a few thousand years is much too short a timeframe for our brains to have evolved new areas specifically devoted to reading.
To account for the development of this skill, some scientists have hypothesized that parts of the brain that originally evolved for other purposes have been “recycled” for reading.
Between shark and ray: The evolutionary advantage of the sea angels (University of Vienna). The “sea angel” is a fossil ray that looks very much like modern rays. So where is the evolution after 155 million Darwin Years? “Today’s species are very similar,” this piece of evolutionary wisdom says, if one can pardon the sophoxymoronic statement.
The oldest known complete fossils of angel sharks are about 160 million years old and demonstrate that the flattened body was established early in their evolution. This also indicates that these extinct angel sharks already had a similar lifestyle as their extant relatives – and that this lifestyle obviously was very successful.
New research suggests racism could be a genetic trait (University of Oslo, via Phys.org). Genetic determinism refuses to die after over a century of philosophical and logical refutation. These ‘experts’ fail to see their Yoda Complex. If racism is genetically predisposed, so is being stupid enough to write things like this:
“We have long known that there is a genetic base for attitudes or political orientation. Studies like this make us able to call it a general finding,” Kennair said.
He added that the researchers also provided new knowledge.
Two decades of pandemic war games failed to account for Donald Trump (Nature). This is a hugely biased attack against the US President, complete with pictures making Trump look bad. “The scenarios foresaw leaky travel bans, a scramble for vaccines and disputes between state and federal leaders, but none could anticipate the current levels of dysfunction in the United States.” The Brits have enough problems of their own than to criticize a US president who, according to conservatives, did a fantastic job of responding to the unprecedented challenges of the coronavirus pandemic. Nature paints the CDC and W.H.O. in rosy-innocent colors, while attacking Trump’s rapid and comprehensive leadership to thwart the virus.
The US may have the most to lose if Donald Trump bans TikTok (New Scientist). This pro-Darwin mouthpiece for ‘science’ would rather allow China to spy on US citizens through this risky-but-popular app than give the president any credit for recognizing the risk. (This story is changing daily; today, Trump is considering allowing Microsoft’s offer to buy TikTok.) The article illustrates the knee-jerk anti-Trump reaction to everything, even to the point of defending China’s dictatorial, totalitarian communist regime that commits human rights abuses up to and including genocide. But a US president who supports individual liberty? Off with his head!
Most Members of Federal Fetal Tissue Ethics Panel Oppose Abortion (The Scientist). This website, ostensibly written for scientists, is upset that Donald Trump appointed pro-lifers to a panel looking into the ethics of using cut-up parts of aborted babies for research. Isn’t that terrible! (Terrible that Trump would do that, not terrible that babies were cut in pieces.)
Of the 15 committee members, appointed by President Donald Trump, 10 have a history of activism against abortion or fetal tissue use. As Buzzfeed News reports, some researchers have voiced concerns that the panel could impair future research on HIV, diabetes, COVID-19 vaccines, and more.
Buzzfeed; yes, that dependably anti-Trump rag that “The Scientists” trust. Doesn’t anyone have the sense to notice that killing one to save another is unethical? What did the babies do to deserve being killed and cut into pieces so that their parts could treat people sick of other diseases? Is that the only way to treat disease? Did any other generation do that? The spin on this story is unbelievable.
Trump signs conservation funding law that will aid national parks (CNN). Here’s one non-science example showing how Big Media just cannot bring itself to praise anything that Trump does. They had to admit that President Trump signed the most expansive national parks bill since Teddy Roosevelt, but look at the opening line: “President Donald Trump signed a measure Tuesday that will fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund — a program his administration’s budget proposals had repeatedly tried to cut.” President Trump has often quipped that if he cured cancer, the mainstream media would criticize him for it.
Too bad for the world that Big Science has turned this way. See Sunday’s post for some reasons why. It didn’t used to be like this. Today, it is leftist, Democrat, anti-Trump, pro-abortion, pro-Darwin, anti-traditional values, anti-intelligent design, bigoted, censoring, socialist, communist, radical and often irrationally stupid. Here and there in the putrid swamp one can find some pure H2O molecules. Better carry a high-tech filter to find them.